Walter Frank Raphael Weldon

Born in 1860, Walter Frank Raphael Weldon studied natural sciences at Cambridge and later taught at University College London before becoming Linacre Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Oxford. He was known as an energetic researcher and teacher, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society during his career.

Weldon is especially remembered for studying variation in animals and for insisting that evolution should be understood through large sets of measured data rather than isolated examples. He worked closely with the statistician Karl Pearson, and their collaboration helped lay foundations for biometry, an early and influential attempt to apply statistical methods to biology.

He was also an important figure in the scientific debates of his time, including the arguments over heredity and natural selection that followed the rise of Mendelian genetics. Weldon died in 1906, but his effort to make biology more quantitative left a lasting mark on both evolutionary science and statistics.